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ADDIS RED SEA Ethiopian Restaurant is probably the only place in Boston where eating with your fingers is the height of cultural refinement. Your meal begins with a hot cloth to freshen up your hands before they dive in. You eat hunched over a large common platter, knee to knee with your friends, bare fingers lazily scooping up sauce-drenched chunks of pliant flatbread - no forks or knives to get in the way. It's a meal that brings out the kid in all of us. In a city where we have multiples of nearly every cuisine, Addis is one of Boston's only Ethiopian restaurants. But now our lonely one has morphed into two: after 20 rave-filled years in the South End, Addis Red Sea has cloned itself in Cambridge.

I'd been meaning to go to the Boston location for years. Although friends described it as one of the few unique dining experiences in town, I was lazy and unsure about what exactly Ethiopian food was, and I never made it in. When the window signs for the new space first went up, I went into a fever. Just a night or two after opening, we muscled our way in. The restaurant was already packed with scores of Cambridge-based aficionados who had been making the cross-river trek to the Boston location for years. Now I know why. Addis is fun.

The dining room is set with basket chairs and low tables, and the servers wear long embroidered dresses as they move almost soundlessly through the room. There's no clinking: no silverware and china to compete with the low sounds of conversation. And the food is interesting and good: spicy and fresh; heavy on thick, peppery stews and crunchy cooked vegetables. There are deep reds from cayenne; soft yellows from turmeric, cumin, and ginger; lots of black pepper; and soothing purple onions cooked down with sesame and virgin olive oil. There are generous mounds of vegetables that are supposed to be good for you: lentils, collards, cabbages. Whatever you order - the spicy veggie and chicken wats (stews), the sautéed tibs of lamb and beef, the chopped salads - it's served on one family-style platter. The server partitions each dish into an island on your own topographic wedge of injera, a soft, sourdough-like flatbread served in a stretchy moon on a round platter as big as a basketball hoop. You tear off a few inches and use the bread as a utensil to capture the good stuff, only slowing down as the bread becomes so saturated with sauce that getting it from platter to mouth becomes a challenge. It's a slow, wonderful way to eat - a group event like sharing a fondue. You take a bite; she takes a bite. He tears from the middle; she tears from the edge.

I have to admit that I enjoy the pace and the playfulness of the cuisine more than I like the food. There's no cream or cheese and very little animal-based protein. Instead, there's a huge and memorable flavor palate of berbere spices that I couldn't quite place. The food is simple but not mild, and a terrific choice for vegans and vegetarians. Since Ethiopia is a mix of Muslims and Orthodox Coptic Christians, there's naturally a strong veggie tilt to the cuisine. The country is a no-pork zone, and Wednesdays and Fridays are no-meat fasting days for the Christian majority. But Addis Red Sea isn't an abstemious place; there's a bar, and the restaurant serves lots of imported beers and wines.

But the injera is the base of the meal. It's the bulk, the plate, the utensil, the constant. It's made from teff, an iron-rich, gluten-free grass that grows in Ethiopia and hardly anywhere else. (However, Addis's co-owner and manager Misrak Assefa says some edgy farmers in California and Michigan are beginning to cultivate it.) For the authentic touch at Addis, ask for the "dark bread." It's made from 100-percent-fermented teff flour; the lighter version is a combo of wheat and barley - think white bread versus stone-ground wheat. Injera is served with everything at Addis: the appetizers, the salads, the main meal, and it's rolled up on a side plate just in case you run out. It's not tasty, particularly - or maybe it's an acquired taste - but you can get sort of addicted, mesmerized by the tearing and the sopping, the spongy elasticity.

More than two decades ago, when Assefa and her husband and partner, artist/photographer Bekele Alemu, first came to Boston for college, she planned to return home to Ethiopia and run the country. Or at least one of the major ministries. "I came to study political science and psychology, and my intention was always to take what I learned back home. But the political situation wasn't stable, and we just sort of stayed in Boston," she says. "It was my husband's vision. The last thing I wanted to do was to run a restaurant. We'd travel around the country, eating at Ethiopian restaurants in America, and the food wasn't that good - and worse, the places were ugly. Not at all a good representation of our historical culture and beautiful country." Alemu became obsessed with opening an Ethiopian restaurant in Boston to showcase the art and the culture, as well as the food.

"Americans don't know it, but Ethiopia is where human life began," says Assefa. "We have discovered human fossils that are over 3.5 million years old. We invented coffee. Most people think it's from Colombia, but it's not. The name comes from Keff, a province in Ethiopia." Although Assefa knew how to cook - she watched her mother spend hours preparing wats for the family each day - her idea of fun was eating out, not cooking at home. She only signed on to the idea of opening a restaurant when Alemu found an Ethiopian chef who relished the idea of inventing a local restaurant. Throughout the years, Addis has developed a core of regulars; when the couple first floated the idea of opening a second location in Cambridge, they discovered that a sizeable chunk of the restaurant's committed clientele is Cambridge-based. Good thing it's a big two-story space.

Eating at Addis is certainly relaxing and educational. But mostly it's fun - and it remains the only place in town where eating with your hands is proper decorum. @